Sometimes, you can be trucking right along, getting things done, being a regular person, with the regular amount of work-related concerns and the regular amount of personal ones. And then you maybe hit a small bump in the road, maybe a meeting runs too long and you haven't looked at the time and your phone rings and you realize you've accidentally stood your mom up for a lunch date. Obviously you feel awful, because what kind of asshole leaves their 68-year-old mother sitting by herself in a Thai restaurant?

Of course you feel awful, but a missed lunch date is not the end of the world, shit happens, so you can't understand why your heart is pounding and your stomach is clenching, or why you spend the next 20 minutes hiding in the bathroom sobbing like a pre-teen with an unrequited crush.

And you're not quite sure why a good cry doesn't fix things like it usually does. You feel deflated, drained. Like a flat tire with a slow leak.

Because sure, maybe you noticed that the tire was a bit soft or maybe you even have one of those fancy cars that gave you a warning light, and you thought you should probably do something about that, but you had a lot of things going on, and it's a pain to take it in, and really it wasn't that bad. You could get to it tomorrow. Or next week.

You could pump it up, of course, but it will just seep out again. Maybe you've even done that a few times.

I'm probably taking this metaphor a bit far.

The point is, sometimes you don't notice. You're Dealing With Shit but everyone else is also Dealing With Shit, because life is a giant pain in the ass. What makes the shit you're dealing with any more important than anyone else's? What kind of asshole makes it all about THEM when their shit is trivial compared to others?

But sometimes you deal with it for long enough that it lets all the air out of your metaphorical tire and, well, you can't fucking go anywhere after that, can you?